If you love the wide open spaces of the Rocky Mountain West, our magnificent mountains, glorious vistas and wildlife of amazing variety, you might consider that you — we — received a very special gift two weeks ago.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that 90,000 acres of pristine Western landscape on the Blanca Ranch in southern Colorado would be protected from future development by a conservation easement held by non-profit Colorado Open Lands (COL). It is part of America’s Great Outdoors, an Obama administration effort to preserve untouched natural landscapes for recreation, wildlife and the future.

The picture-perfect property has three awesome fourteeners — Mount Lindsey, and Blanca and Little Bear peaks — vast grasslands, forests and tundra, between the Great Sand Dunes National Park and La Veta Pass. Salazar, who grew up in the valley, must have been honored to make the announcement.

Land owner Louis Bacon is a New York hedge fund manager, a billionaire with a passion for wildlife and conservation. An outdoorsman and experienced bow hunter, his charitable foundation benefits environmental causes.

Bacon has properties across the nation, with conservation easements on many. Property remains in private ownership, to continue as working landscapes such as farms and ranches, but an easement gives away the right to develop the property, and the owner gains tax advantages for giving away those rights.

Before this gift, Colorado had more than 1.8 million acres protected by conservation easements, ensuring that future generations will still see some undeveloped lands. Many San Luis Valley properties were platted decades ago, so there is the potential threat that as Colorado population booms, the natural landscapes could disappear under subdivisions, an irreversible loss.

Bacon owns the Blanca and Trinchera ranches, a combined 172,000 acres. In 2004, the Forbes family, which bought Trinchera in 1970, donated an 81,400-acre conservation easement to COL; it was the largest land protection easement in the state’s history, and the first in Colorado’s Ranching for Wildlife program. Since Bacon’s 2009 purchase, the ranches are run for wildlife, migratory birds and endangered species, with a large elk herd and cutthroat trout, and restoring damaged natural landscape.

The easements mean that for generations to come, this untouched Western landscape will give us natural scenic beauty, unfettered space and a sense of freedom. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completes an environmental assessment of the land, there will be some public access.

Bacon hopes these two easements will encourage other land owners to establish easements to form the proposed Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area, a 5 million-acre, relatively uninterrupted wildlife migration corridor through Colorado and northern New Mexico, for black bears, cougars, deer, elk and bighorn sheep, to protect wildlife resources and wetland habitat, based on watersheds.

Bacon calls Blanca Peak and its surroundings a state and national treasure — and he is right. Last year Xcel Energy and the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association announced they would run solar transmission lines across Trinchera Ranch, much to the dismay of many environmentalists and locals, and Bacon fought back. The proposal was dropped.

“In 1976, Colorado passed enabling legislature for conservation easements, and it is a way to keep ranchers on the land,” recounted Dan Pike, COL’s executive director. “This easement is a big benchmark in conservation history. ”

“Our only hope for maintaining viable wildlife species is working landscapes,” observed Michael Blenden, project leader of the San Luis Valley National Wildlife Refuges. Alamosa, Monte Vista and Baca refuges are part of the 150 million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System. “In the past we worked with postage stamp-size sites, and then we found we could work with land owners, and that we didn’t have to own everything to accomplish good things.”

And we the public get the bonus of enjoying maintained scenic vistas — today and for decades to come.

Joanne Ditmer’s Denver Post column on environmental and urban issues began in 1962.